Designing a document databaseLooking at views

time to read 2 min | 334 words

I was asked how we can handle more complex views scenarios. So let us take a look at how we can deal with them.

Joins

In a many to one scenario, (post & comments), how can we get both on them in one call to the database? I am afraid that I am not doing anything new here, since the technique is actually described here. The answer to that is quite simple, you don’t. What you can do, however, is generate a view that will allow you to get both of them at the same time. For example:

image

The key here is that views are always calculated in sort order, so what is actually happening here is that we sort by post id, then by IsPost. Since false is higher then true, the actual post is always the first item, with the comments directly following that. This means that we can query for all of them in one DB call.

Returning more than a single result per row

To be fair, I haven’t considered this, but it seems like a pretty obvious that this is needed. Here is the original request:

Question: can a view contain more rows than the underlying document database? For example: assume an invoice database (each document is an invoice with buyer's and seller's Tax ID). I want to create index: Tax ID -> #of invoices, where tax id can belong either to buyer or seller. In worst case scenario, unique tax IDs in every invoice, we'll have index with 2N entries. How view syntax would look like?

If I understand the problem correctly, this can be resolve using the following view definition:

image

Thoughts?

More posts in "Designing a document database" series:

  1. (17 Mar 2009) What next?
  2. (16 Mar 2009) Remote API & Public API
  3. (16 Mar 2009) Looking at views
  4. (15 Mar 2009) View syntax
  5. (14 Mar 2009) Aggregation Recalculating
  6. (13 Mar 2009) Aggregation
  7. (12 Mar 2009) Views
  8. (11 Mar 2009) Replication
  9. (11 Mar 2009) Attachments
  10. (10 Mar 2009) Authorization
  11. (10 Mar 2009) Concurrency
  12. (10 Mar 2009) Scale
  13. (10 Mar 2009) Storage